


Drowning

by LadyOfTheLake666



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Canon Compliant, Drowning, Gen, M/M, Missing Scene, Sherlock Holmes Has Feelings, TJLC | The Johnlock Conspiracy, The Final Problem, True Love's Kiss
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-18
Updated: 2020-08-18
Packaged: 2021-03-05 23:20:52
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,180
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25973545
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LadyOfTheLake666/pseuds/LadyOfTheLake666
Summary: Eurus tells Sherlock where Victor Trevor, his childhood playmate, died. He drowned inside a well, unfound and alone, as Sherlock wasn’t there to save him.It is the same place she’s chained up John Watson.A canon-compliant one-shot, based on a scene in The Final Problem.
Relationships: Sherlock Holmes/John Watson
Comments: 12
Kudos: 87





	Drowning

There are a lot of things that the world’s _only_ consulting detective doesn’t know about. That the earth revolves around the sun, why people trust in horoscopes, the art of flipping pancakes, how to defuse a bomb (when there isn’t an off-switch), what forever really feels like.

That sort of thing.

*

“Help me save John Watson”, Sherlock pleads, kneeling in front of his long-lost sister Eurus.

For a long, tense moment, she is silent, gazing intently at him.

(It might’ve been just a few seconds, but Sherlock doesn’t know that)

It is a dark, musty room, moonlight trickling in through the cracks in the walls. She is clad in a white nightgown, her arms are thin and cold, a sad and hungry look in her eyes. This is her childhood room, a corner in the dusty attic that her two brothers rarely visited, a world with boarded-up windows and rotting floorboards that she could call her own, where she stayed hidden and _alone_.

Until Sherlock solved the puzzle she’d set some two decades ago and finally sought her out.

The trembling fingers cradling her grey-blonde hair are soft, the arms around her back are warm and tender. She looks upon her brother’s face that is carved with pain and desperation, helplessness and hope.

She’s seen that expression of unguarded terror only once, when he was a child playing pirates, and in her anger and bitterness at being abandoned, she’d relished it.

But now, her resolve falters. Perhaps she realizes, they weren't children anymore or that Sherlock is far changed from what she remembers and so she bends and whispers in his ear, the place where Victor Trevor died, unfound and alone, where John Watson is drowning.

Sherlock flinches and gets up but Eurus stops him, tugging at his coat.

“Thought you might need these”, she says in her faraway wistful voice, handing him a rope and a pair of bolt cutters.

Sherlock takes them from her pale hands, looking from the tools to Eurus’ vulnerable form. Caught in a whirlwind of emotions -pain and love for his sister, terror and panicked urgency for John- he only manages to murmur, “I’ll…I’ll be back. I’ll bring you home.”

He looks at her once, as if about to say something more but then he turns and then he’s running, bounding down the winding stairs, the walls of his ancestral burnt-down house creaking around him, but he doesn’t care, he needs to get to John Watson as soon as he can. It doesn’t matter that he is breathless and frightened and his heart is hammering too fast for him to think. Not even Moriarty when he’d strapped John with enough ammunition to blow off a building, had him this cowered or daunted.

This is Sherlock’s first taste of forever- bitter, ashen, heady like a drug-fueled dream he cannot wake up from.

*

The water rises along the crumbling, mossy walls.

John Watson struggles against the chains binding his legs, his fingers fumbling to get a grip on the bricks, just high enough to breathe.

Even after the first encounter with Moriarty at the darkened swimming pool, he’d never got round to telling Sherlock that he couldn’t swim.

(Not that Sherlock ever took into account John’s preferences when choosing crime scenes or a good murder spot. After Reichenbach, John had simply given up)

The water is rising past his neck.

It steadily rises, swirling around him, like a cold and heavy shroud. John’s vision dazzles with moonlight and the rush of strong winds and he cannot shout for help anymore, without the water rushing through his mouth.

For a few brief minutes, (since waking up chained at the bottom of the well, next to the bones of a dead child and waist-deep in ice-cold water) there’d been Sherlock’s voice at least, panic-stricken but firm, promising help, an assurance that despite figuring out family puzzles and unscrambling the faded dates on tombstones, he was devoting his remaining brain cells on the matter of John’s survival.

Then there was a hiss of static and the line went dead, and the water climbed higher and higher.

*

Sherlock runs through the woods.

This is the forest of his childhood, where he hid among the tall beech trees from Mycroft, where he buried treasure beneath the lichen-covered undergrowth for Victor to find, where he sometimes disappeared for hours on end, to think and wander in the dappled sunlight.

It is strange how singularly focused his mind is, at this time of crisis. The walls of his Mind Palace repeat and echo a single word, a single syllable stretched painfully into two, over and over, like the delayed feedback from a mic.

 _John. John_. _Joh…n._

The cold wind slices his cheeks, his dark ruffled hair. His coat catches the nettle, his feet stumble over tangled roots and stones.

Sherlock cannot run fast enough.

He remembers the smell of bonfires and dried branches and John, gagged and trapped inside the wood stack, unable to scream, but back then, he had time on his side and…and Mary too. He recalls the time John and his then-girlfriend were kidnapped by the Chinese mafia and he’d arrived just in the nick of time to save them and John, who usually was full of fawning praise and admiration, only accused him of being late.

Sherlock can taste his own, hot tears.

He could not be late. He _must not_ be late.

The taste of forever builds up slowly, like drowsily waking up in a dark room and then discovering that it is locked from the outside.

*

The water reaches past his eyes.

Most people would prefer a gunshot wound to drowning, if only it made for a quicker death.

John who got shot at in Afghanistan and tasted forever in the two years when Sherlock was presumed dead, and again in the months when Mary firmly remained dead, would do anything, literally anything to pull a gun to his head and blow his brains out, instead of slowly dying underwater, flailing his limbs, gasping for air, begging his best friend, his genius incredible insufferable _best friend_ to perform one last miracle and save him.

He’s under the water now, and no matter how hard he lurches or pulls, he cannot keep his head afloat.

And Sherlock Holmes, his best man, the man he literally counted his life on, who was last heard deciphering a nursery rhyme, isn’t here.

John doesn’t hate him.

Instead, his last thoughts, as the water engulfs him, are of regret, bitterness at what he has left unsaid.

The taste of forever has a lingering unpleasant aftertaste. It is nauseating, and even though John isn’t entirely unfamiliar with it, it hits him like a fresh wound and his grip slackens and his vision goes black.

“Sher-sherlock”, he gurgles and the rest of his words are lost to the bubbling water.

*

“John!”, Sherlock cries, flinging the rope down to the murky depths of the well.

There is no reply.

For one brief moment, Sherlock thinks that perhaps it is too late and he cannot hear the John’s shout for help because his own heart is hammering like an incoming train, so loud and white-bright that it deafens and blinds everything else- the wind among the trees, the gurgling water, his own screams. But then he looks down into the darkness of the well and his world halts.

_It is too late._

His jaw tightens; John Watson cannot be dead. He will descend into, or raise, if it comes to that, any kind of hell and drag him out before that ever happens.

_But what if it is too late?_

It takes him twenty seconds to tightly fix the rope, another fifteen to ensure the knot will hold although he cannot be sure, and five more seconds to clamber onto the inside of the well. His eyes burn with sweat and tears, as he flings his coat on the ground and he lets out a breath he didn’t realize he’d been holding, as he painstakingly begins the downward descent, to the sound of rushing and rising water.

The walls of the well where Victor Trevor drowned in, are slimy and wet, gleaming faintly silver in the moonlight.

“John!”, he repeats with his tired lips, aloud and in his mind, like a broken record. John is down there, he knows it, he’s seen the shadow, but the walls are long, stretching out like a steep unending road and Sherlock is slowly grasping what forever feels like, what it _really_ feels like.

(Falling would be so simple and even pleasant. After all, he’s done it before)

His feet brushes against something that isn’t rock or bone and his heart lurches and he hasn’t swum since middle school but he breathes a lungful of air and plunges into the water, fingers fumbling at John’s body, his soaked clothes.

He doesn’t think, he cannot think and he can barely see and his hands are on John’s chest, his waist and Sherlock cannot breathe and his head hurts but his hands need to find, travelling downwards, his legs, his feet and then Sherlock finally feels it, the rattle of rusty chains and he misses precious seconds as he rummages in his pockets for the bolt-cutter, with his other hand holding John and then he finds it, but the chains are too heavy and Sherlock has no choice but to rise up for air, for one sweet breath of cold moonlit air and he dives again and this time it works, there isn’t any clinching sound over the water but the chains give away and John’s limp body tilts away and Sherlock grabs him, pulling him close and he cannot hear anything and he tugs on the rope and begins to climb.

*

There are a lot of things that the world’s only consulting detective doesn’t know about. That rock-climbing requires nimble skill and practice, why meditation might be more efficient than drugs, how to revive a person from drowning, that the length of forever can stretch anywhere between a few seconds and a million years.

It takes Sherlock thirty minutes to get himself and John out of that well, but he isn’t counting anymore.

He isn’t counting because it feels like forever.

*

It takes roughly twenty-four hours for a person to die of drowning.

This is a fact that is buried in some forgotten corner of Sherlock’s Mind Palace. He doesn’t bother to check for it.

*

Panting, Sherlock rests John’s body on the ground. He looks around, but neither the police nor Eurus nor Mycroft are here yet, and there is only the forest and his rasping breath and John’s prone body, soaked and heavy and perfectly still.

He isn’t sure how to do this.

He’s the detective, not the doctor.

His fingers are trembling as he unbuttons John’s soggy shirt and wraps him in the warmth of his own dark coat. Carefully, he pulls him close and dials for Lestrade again.

The police are goddamn late.

Hell, he cannot do this.

“John! John can you hear me?”, Sherlock cries, kneeling beside him. He laces his fingers and gently presses down on John’s chest, several times.

It doesn’t work.

John’s eyes remain closed, his body unbreathing.

Sherlock tilts John’s neck, lifting it up slightly. His hands quiver as he lightly pulls his mouth open. With one hand on his chin and the other pinching his nostrils shut, Sherlock bends over and presses his mouth over John’s and breathes into him.

He breathes again and again, hoping for John’s chest to rise and fall.

*

Sherlock’s never been the one to believe in faerytales, the kiss of life, that sort of thing. His cases, though bizarre at times, never involved awakening a dead bride from a glass coffin or a dreaming princess from an ivy-entwined castle. They were usually more mundane, involving guns and bombs, that guaranteed if not a victory, quick and foolproof deaths.

There is a grace and dignity to that.

Sherlock’s kissed before, of course, although his experiences were limited and not particularly favorable. Kissing and the issue of romantic entanglements that such a gesture automatically presupposes are, like faerytales, subjects he rarely dwells upon. He’s certainly never wondered doing it with John Watson and this technically isn’t kissing, but god forbid, if Sherlock Holmes _had_ to kiss John Watson, this isn’t how he’d like to do it.

Yet Sherlock can’t help but think and shudder, that all those childhood stories about the power of a true love’s kiss and the breath of life, did indeed have a kernel of truth to them.

*

John still isn’t breathing.

Sherlock’s afraid he isn’t doing it right. After all, this is the first time he’s had to do this and he’s working from the dregs of a memory buried deep within his Mind Palace: an instruction manual he’d seen somewhere and filed away.

To be fair, he’s more accustomed to corpses.

Sherlock pauses for air, staring into the starlit sky and then bends again, closing John’s open mouth with his, and breathing firmly into him, again and again.

He doesn’t know how long he’s been doing this.

Forever feels like being trapped inside a time capsule. It is a maddening sensation, to be without hope, yet to keep hoping, to watch in mute horror, as something you never wanted to lose, slowly slips away from your fingers, like sand, like air.

Forever is like a voiceless scream, a room without air, a drowning.

Sherlock cradles John in his arms, breathing into his mouth, gently pressing his chest. The forest wraps around them, the dead leaves rustling and the moist wind whistling through the skeletal branches.

It is all he can do.

*

John gasps.

Sherlock jerks back, instinctively, as John gasps a second time and coughs out water and vomit and spit and Sherlock is the one who cannot believe his eyes, who cannot breathe.

John coughs again and Sherlock helps him up, a firm hand rubbing his back, letting John to rest on his side.

(Sherlock is grateful that John cannot see his face)

When his coughing stops and his breathing gradually eases, Sherlock asks tentatively, “Are you- are you alright?”

It takes a while for John to adjust to his surroundings- the damp forest floor, the faint moonlight, his wet jeans and undershirt, the furious heartbeat of the person next to him. John turns to look at Sherlock.

“I’m wearing your coat”, he states.

And maybe because Sherlock has been so afraid that he’d never see John again, or he finally realized what forever really felt like or he was delirious from the fact that despite impossible odds he’s managed to save John Watson from certain death yet again that he leans forward and closes the thin space between them with a kiss.

Sherlock’s lips upon John’s are soft.

Soft and gentle, like freshly-fallen snow. It is a chaste kiss, a ghost of a kiss, as his lips faintly brush against John’s own, moist and rough, and then he pulls back.

He pulls back just as John leans in, his lips half-parted.

(Sherlock hadn’t anticipated that John may have wanted to kiss him back)

Something uncurls in his heart. Plebians would’ve called it sentiment but that’s one of the things that the world’s only consulting detective knows nothing about, and it surprises him in a warm and pleasant way.

“Bastard”, John mutters softly.

And it surprises him even more when John pulls him close to kiss him, deeply and hungrily, his hands on Sherlock’s neck, his cheeks, fingers in the dark curls of his hair and Sherlock kisses him back, a bit clumsy and awkward, dimly wondering what to do with his hands before they settle on wrapping around John’s back.

For once, Sherlock’s Mind Palace is blissfully and utterly blank.

It isn’t a perfect kiss, like in the stories and when they pull back to breathe, they aren’t really sure how to acknowledge it or what to make of it because they can see lights in the distance and the distant blare of sirens.

“About time”, Sherlock curses, as the figure of Lestrade, running towards them with a flashlight, slowly comes into view.

This time it’s John who gets a shock blanket and Sherlock is slightly peeved although he doesn’t show it.

*

Eurus is led away by a group of officers in a police van. It is only when the van is out of sight that John quietly asks Sherlock if he is okay.

Sherlock’s looking at something in the distance, thoughtful and still somewhat unsettled.

“I said I’d bring her home”, he says quietly. “I can’t, can I?”

There’s the barest hint of sadness and regret in his voice.

John purses his lips.

“Well you gave her what she was looking for: context.”

They’re walking so closely together. Sherlock has got his coat back and John is wrapped in a grey blanket. A car awaits them to take them to visit Mycroft and then to the Baker Street flat.

Sherlock looks around and then back at John, as though searching his face for answers.

“Is that good?”, he asks.

The problem with Sherlock is that he leaves too much unsaid.

_Is that good?_

There’s a look of raw honesty on Sherlock’s face, John notices. A look that says Sherlock deeply cares and values what John’s opinion is, that he doesn’t care what is wrong or right but he needs to know what John thinks…of this…of all of this…of _him_.

It’s a look that says that John Watson matters to him, that he always did and always will.

It’s a look that if Sherlock could see for himself, he’d immediately categorize it as “sentiment” and file it away under “margin for human error”.

The problem with John is that he’s never sure what the right answer is.

John clears his throat.

“It’s not good, it’s not bad. It’s…”, He turns away, searching for the right words, but he cannot find any. So he settles on what Sherlock himself had told him, a week before, and says, “It is what it is.”

It isn’t the perfect answer. But they’ve never been perfect, either as people or as friends, and so it’ll have to do.

Sherlock looks at him intently.

_It is what it is._

*

There are a lot of things that the world’s _only_ consulting detective doesn’t know about. The power of a true love’s kiss, why most people prefer sentiment to common sense, the benefits of beekeeping as a viable retirement hobby, why an ex-military doctor with a psychosomatic limb chose to stick around an insufferable flat-mate who constantly sets the kitchen on fire and keeps human heads in the fridge.

That sort of thing.

But Sherlock’s Mind Palace is a sprawling place and it is his John Watson who keeps reminding him of the cobwebbed corners that need dusting and the empty rooms, still waiting to be filled with new ideas and wisdom. 

Well, it isn’t exactly homely _yet_ , but it is what it is.

**Author's Note:**

> In other news, I haven't stepped out of my house in five months and I'm slowly losing my sanity. 
> 
> Please let me know what you think of this fic and if you'd be interested in more. And I'm on tumblr as ladyofthelake666 so if you wanna fangirl over Sherlock, anything geeky or just say hi, feel free to message!


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